Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce, and Debt in Civil War Era North Carolina

9. What the Landlord and the Storeman Choose to Make It: General Stores, Pawnshops, and Boardinghouses in the New South

Chapter nine What the Landlord and the Storeman Choose to Make It General Stores, Pawnshops, & Boardinghouses in the New South I f the experience of Dr. James Webb serves as a useful example of the antebellum gift economy, the life of his son, James Webb Jr., epitomizes the new system of credit that developed after the Civil War. While his father liberally extended credit as a pillar of the local gift economy , only to be disgraced by bankruptcy, his son made his living extending credit as the proprietor of Hillsborough’s largest general store.Whereas the father saw lending money as the social obligation of a prosperous member of the community, the son believed that the primary role of credit was to facilitate his own financial interests. The difference between their experiences , choices, and concepts of debt underscores the revolutionary change brought about in southern societyas a consequence of the Civil War.Within the deep gulf that separated father and son, North Carolinians were simultaneously liberated and enslaved by their debts. This new conception of debt that emerged among white North Carolinians in the decades after the Civil War differed in two important respects from its antebellum precursor. First, it lacked the heavy moral overtones that characterized antebellum debt. To be sure, debt maintained certain negative connotations throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, but white North Carolinians increasingly thought and wrote about debt in pragmatic terms. Whereas men like Dr. James Webb engaged in rhetorical feats to disguise their indebtedness, using the language of the gift economy, postbellum white North Carolinians routinely unmasked themselves as debtors. By thus exposing themselves as debtors, they created opportunities to recognize structural elements of the economy that maintained and exacerbated their indebtedness. This recognition that they belonged to a community of credit and debt 174 debtors prompted many North Carolinians to push for political and economic reform in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Theabolitionofslaverycontributedtothedemiseofthestigmathatwhite North Carolinians pinned to debt. Without the pressing need to maintain the illusion of mastery, white North Carolinians became less attached to the idea that indebtedness implied dependence and, by association, slavery. As the metaphor of the debt slave lost its connection to actual chattel slavery, white North Carolinians found that they could contract debts without assuming the ideologically submissive position of a slave. For black North Carolinians, however, the debt-slave metaphor continued to have deep reverberations. Having secured their freedom in 1865, African Americans avoided situations that resembled the exploitation they experienced in slavery. Some African Americans sought to avoid debt altogether because of the taint of dependence that it created. In September 1865, the Journal of Freedom, a black newspaper in Raleigh, urged its readers to “trade with and patronize your friends, but, above all, each other.— Encourage your brethren who embark in trade or any mechanical or other useful industry, though at some personal inconvenience; keep out of debt; work if possible, for men whom you esteem and trust; and each of you become land-holders so soon as you can without running into debt.”1 Although avoiding debt became a goal for many African Americans, the economic realities of the postwar South necessitated that they enter into credit relationships, most often with white landlords and shopkeepers.While debt never developed the social stigma among postbellum African Americans that it had among antebellum whites, they often imbued debt with moral connotations that no longer had much currency in the white community. A second factor in the creation of a new postbellum conception of debt can be traced to the disappearance of antebellum social credit networks after the Civil War, replaced by more centralized models of credit in which many debtors owed money to an individual or entity. North Carolinians reconceived of debt in increasingly pecuniary terms, downplaying, although never entirely abandoning, its social aspects. This new conception of debt was shaped fundamentally by North Carolinians’ experience during the Civil War and Reconstruction. The disastrous economic conditions during that period decimated the antebellum credit system and undermined whatever desire North Carolinians might have had in revitalizing it. At the same time, the rapid modernization of the southern economy after 1865 pushed North Carolinians into novel credit relationships.2 More than almost any other institution after the Civil War, general General Stores, Pawnshops, and Boardinghouses in the New South 175 stores catered to a broad spectrum of southern society across lines of class, race...